Independents edge away from Obama

In a potentially alarming trend for the White House, independent voters are deserting President Barack Obama nationally and especially in key swing states, recent polls suggest.

Obama’s job approval rating hit a — still healthy — low of 56 percent in the Gallup Poll on Wednesday. And pollsters are debating whether Obama’s expansive and expensive policy proposals or the ground-level realities of a still-faltering economy are driving the falling numbers.

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But a source of the shift appears to be independent voters, who seem to be responding to Republican complaints of excessive spending and government control.

“This is a huge sea change that is playing itself out in American politics,” said Democratic pollster Doug Schoen. “Independents who had become effectively operational Democrats in 2006 and 2008 are now up for grabs and are trending Republican.

“They’re saying, ‘Costing too much, no results, see the downside, not sure of the upside,’” he said.

The White House denies there’s been any real shift.

“The independent numbers I have seen, public and private, have been relatively steady,” Obama’s senior political adviser, David Axelrod, said in an e-mail.

Another political adviser dismissed small state polls as statistically questionable and pointed out that Obama’s own numbers remain strong, by historical standards — with an average 59 percent approval rating among independents in June, according to Gallup.

Pollsters from both parties debate the numbers’ meaning, but averages of public polls have shown a gentle downward trend.

Obama retains extremely strong support from Democrats, and earlier this year lost much of the Republican support that followed a giddy Inauguration. It is the independents who appear to be currently on the move: Obama dropped 6 percentage points last week from the week before in Gallup’s tracking poll, and Quinnipiac University found a 5-percentage-point drop in approval from independents between early June and early July. Recent state polling shows drops over longer periods.

A Quinnipiac University poll of voters in economically troubled Ohio, released Tuesday, showed Obama’s approval rating slipping 8 points, to below 50 percent, from a poll two months earlier, with a plurality of 48 percent of independent voters disapproving of his job performance. A Public Policy Polling survey in Virginia found Obama’s approval and disapproval numbers effectively tied, with independents disapproving of the president’s job performance, 52 percent to 38 percent.

“That is fairly consistent with all our polling around the country — Obama tends to be really well-liked personally, but he’s starting to lose a majority of the independents,” said Public Policy’s Dean Debnam. Democrats have “had long enough in some voters’ minds that they’re getting blame for nothing happening, and Republicans are scaring them around health care and tax increases.”

Pollsters differ on the degree to which the independents’ migration is driven by Obama’s policies, rather than the broader economic downturn. “Local politics is local politics, and I don’t see an awful lot of spillover from D.C. into the state races,” said Debnam.

And Obama, of course, isn’t up for reelection anytime soon, and even nervous Democratic congressmen can keep their fingers crossed for economic recovery over the next year.

“It’s been more or less inevitable that we’re going to see some decline in numbers for Democrats,” said Mark Mellman, another Democratic pollster. “For most folks, there’s not an election until 2010, and most economists suggest that by the time we get to 2010, we’re going to see the beginnings of an uptick in the economy.”